This article is a general list of applications sorted by category, as a reference for those looking for packages. Many sections are split between console and graphical applications.

Tip:

This page exists primarily to make it easier to search for alternatives to an application that you do not know under which section has been added. Use the links in the template at the top to view the main sections as separate pages.

Please consider installing the pkgstats package, which provides a timer that sends a list of the packages installed on your system, along with the architecture and the mirrors you use, to the Arch Linux developers in order to help them prioritize their efforts and make the distribution even better. The information is sent anonymously and cannot be used to identify you. You can view the collected data at the Statistics page. More information is available in this forum thread.

Daemon packages usually include the relevant systemd unit file to start; some packages even include different ones. After installation pacman -Qql package | grep -Fe .service -e .socket can be used to check and find the relevant one.

Note: Applications listed in "Console" sections can have graphical front-ends. Official ones are currently omitted.

Pale Moon — A Firefox fork focussing on speed, with a pre-Firefox 29 interface. Uses Goanna layout engine, a fork of Gecko. Firefox add-ons may not be compatible. [1] Without support for newer Firefox features such as cache2, e10s, and OTMC.

Qualia LAN Messenger — P2P chat application for intranet communication and does not require a server. A variety of handy features are supported including notifications, personal and group messaging with encryption, file transfer and message logging.

digiKam — KDE-based image organizer with built-in editing features via a plugin architecture. digiKam asserts it is more full featured than similar applications with a larger set of image manipulation features including RAW image import and manipulation.

GIMP — Image editing suite in the vein of proprietary editors such as Adobe Photoshop. GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) has been started in the mid 1990s and has acquired a large number of plugins and additional tools.

GraphicsMagick — Fork of ImageMagick designed to have API and command-line stability. It also supports multi-CPU for enhanced performance and thus is used by some large commercial sites (Flickr, etsy) for its performance.

ImageMagick — Command-line image manipulation program. It is known for its accurate format conversions with support for over 100 formats. Its API enables it to be scripted and it is usually used as a backend processor.

KolourPaint — Free raster graphics editor for KDE, similar to Microsoft's Paint application before Windows 7, but with some additional features such as support for transparency. Part of kde-applications and kdegraphics groups.

Inkscape — Vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. It's developers also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.

VLC — Highly portable multimedia player with ncurses interface module, and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

Qtractor — Qt-based hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation application that aims to provide digital audio workstation software simple enough for the average home user, and yet powerful enough for the professional user.

Terminal emulators

Terminal emulators show a GUI Window that contains a terminal. Most emulate Xterm, which in turn emulates VT102, which emulates typewriter. For further background information, see Wikipedia:Terminal emulator.

framebuffer-based

In GNU/Linux world, the framebuffer could be refered to a virtual device in the Linux kernel (fbdev) or the virtual framebuffer system for X (xvfb). This section mainly lists the terminal emulators that based on the in-kernel virtual device, i.e. fbdev.

yaft — A simple terminal emulator for living without X, with UCS2 glyphs, wallpaper and 256color support.

Brackets — A free open-source editor written in HTML, CSS, and Javascript with a primary focus on Web Development. It was created by Adobe Systems, licensed under the MIT License, and is currently maintained on GitHub.

Ninja-IDE — from the recursive acronym: "Ninja-IDE Is Not Just Another IDE", is a cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE); runs on Linux/X11, Mac OS X and Windows OSs. Used, for example, for Python development

Scratch — A multimedia authoring tool for educational and entertainment purposes, such as creating interactive projects and simple sprite-based games. It is used primarly by unskilled users (such as children) as an entry to event-driven programming. Scratch is free software under GPL v2 and Scratch Source Code License.

collectl — Collectl is a light-weight performance monitoring tool capable of reporting interactively as well as logging to disk. It reports statistics on cpu, disk, infiniband, lustre, memory, network, nfs, process, quadrics, slabs and more in easy to read format.

Package management

Input methods

Documents and texts

Office suites

Calligra — Actively developed fork of KOffice, the KDE office suite. It offers most of the features of OpenOffice while also having versions for smartphones (Calligra Mobile) and tablets (Calligra Active).

Symphytum — Personal database software for everyone who desires to manage and organize data in an easy and intuitive way, without having to study complex database languages and software user interfaces.

PDF and DjVu

acroreadAUR is able to save both AcroForms and XFA forms into PDF files.

Poppler-based readers such as evince and okular support AcroForms, but not full XFA forms. [3][4]

For CJK(Chinese, Japanese, Korean) support in poppler-based readers such as evince and okular, install poppler-data. poppler-data is an optional dependency of poppler which is an indirect dependency of evince and okular.

Xpdf — Viewer that can decode LZW and read encrypted PDFs. Note that due to removal of all Type1 fonts from the gsfonts package, you will need to install them from an archive package - see https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/50297

OCRFeeder — Python GUI for Gnome which performs document analysis and rendition, and can use either CuneiForm, GOCR, Ocrad or Tesseract as OCR engines. It can import from PDF or image files, and export to HTML or OpenDocument.

Mind-mapping tools

Freeplane — Free and open source software application that supports thinking, sharing information and getting things done at work, in school and at home. The software can be used for mind mapping and analyzing the information contained in mind maps.

View Your Mind — Tool to generate and manipulate maps which show your thoughts. Such maps can help you to improve your creativity and effectivity. You can use them for time management, to organize tasks, to get an overview over complex contexts, to sort your ideas etc.

Light-locker — A simple locker (forked from gnome-screensaver) that aims to have simple, sane, secure defaults and be well integrated with the desktop while not carrying any desktop-specific dependencies. It relies on LightDM for locking and unlocking your session via ConsoleKit/UPower or logind/systemd

sxlock — Fork of sflock with a few enhancements. Provides basic user feedback, uses PAM authentication, supports DPMS and RandR. Supports sxlock.service to lock the screen on suspend/hibernation. See the README for more information.

Mathics — A free CAS for symbolic mathematical computations which uses Python as its main language. It aims at achieving a Mathematica-compatible syntax and functions. It relies mostly on Sympy for most mathematical tasks and, optionally, Sage for more advanced functionality.

FreeMat — Matlab-like program that supports many of its functions and features a codeless interface to external C, C++, and Fortran code, further parallel distributed algorithm development (via MPI), and 3D visualization capabilities.

Chemistry and biology

Computational biology and bioinformatics

BALL (Biochemical Algorithms Library) — Application framework in C++ that provides an extensive set of data structures as well as classes for molecular mechanics, advanced solvation methods, comparison and analysis of protein structures, file import/export, and visualization.

Quantum ESPRESSO — Integrated suite of applications for electronic-structure calculations and materials modeling at nanoscale. It is based on density-functional theory, plane waves, and pseudopotentials (both norm-conserving and ultrasoft).

Skychart / Cartes du Ciel — Planetarium that maps out and labels most of the constellations, planets, and objects you can see with a telescope. It can also download Digitized Sky Survey Charts and superimpose images over these charts.

gvSIG — vSIG is a geographic information system (GIS), that is, a desktop application designed for capturing, storing, handling, analyzing and deploying any kind of referenced geographic information in order to solve complex management and planning problems.

Others

Finance

Beancount — A double-entry bookkeeping computer language that lets you define financial transaction records in a text file, read them in memory, generate a variety of reports from them, and provides a web interface.

Grisbi — Personal finance system which manages third party, expenditure and receipt categories, as well as budgetary lines, financial years, and other information that makes it suitable for associations.

KMyMoney — Personal finance manager that operates in a similar way to Microsoft Money. It supports different account types, categorisation of expenses and incomes, reconciliation of bank accounts and import/export to the “QIF” file format.

hledger — An accounting program for tracking money, time, or any other commodity, using double-entry accounting and a simple, editable file format. hledger is inspired by and largely compatible with ledger.

Runa — Fast and light dmenu-driven desktop application launcher, suitable for use standalone, integrated into file manager context menus, or as an 'xdg-open' replacement. Favourite applications can also be configured.

Whippet — A launcher and xdg-open replacement for control freaks. Opens files and URLs with applications associated by name and/or mimetype. Applications and associations may be customized using an SQLite database. Uses dmenu to manage its menus.

Tip: In order to avoid installing one more package, you may find convenient to use the display utility from imagemagick or gm display from graphicsmagick. E.g.: display -backdrop -background '#3f3f3f' -flatten -window root image.